The Frenzied Last-Act Effort to Save City Opera

The curtain call for “Anna Nicole,” New York City Opera’s final production, last Saturday.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

In the frenzied final days of New York City Opera, when it was becoming clear that an urgent drive to raise $7 million for its very survival was failing, the general manager, George Steel, found himself scrounging for money wherever he might find it.

He had lunch with Alberto W. Vilar, the onetime opera patron who had promised huge gifts to the Metropolitan Opera that failed to materialize and who was later jailed for fraud. He spoke by phone with Plácido Domingo, who sang at City Opera’s first night at Lincoln Center in 1966, and who agreed to urge donors to open their checkbooks. And he spent a night at the opera last month with David H. Koch, the billionaire who paid to renovate the opera’s former home at Lincoln Center, and who remained one of its biggest donors even after the company left the redone theater to save money.

But there was a hitch. The opera they saw, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole,” tells the more-or-less true life story of Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy model who married an octogenarian oil tycoon, J. Howard Marshall II, and who waged a fierce battle with his heirs over his estate after he died. Mr. Marshall, it turned out, had owned 16 percent of the Koch family’s business, Koch Industries. When Mr. Steel asked Mr. Koch if he could make further gifts to save the company, Mr. Koch demurred, telling Mr. Steel that the Marshall family might be less than pleased, according to a person familiar with their conversation.

In the end no one rode to the rescue of City Opera, which, through a series of missteps over the past decade, had lost the confidence of the donors on whom it was increasingly dependent. The opera company, 70 years old, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday.

As it began winding down its affairs this week, interviews with current and former company officials, board members and donors made it clear that behind its optimistic public facade, the troupe had long been in even more precarious shape than it had publicly acknowledged.

“There was a bankruptcy attorney — not on retainer, because he’s working pro bono, but already in the fold — when I took the job,” Mr. Steel, who took the helm in 2009, said in an interview this week in the company’s eerily empty offices in Lower Manhattan, on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange, after most of the staff had been laid off. “We started out leaning over the cliff,” he said. “That was the starting position.”

A cash crisis forced City Opera to leave its Lincoln Center home — the New York State Theater, renamed the David H. Koch Theater — in 2011, when it determined it could no longer afford the fixed costs there. But doing so earned bad publicity and the ire of the troupe’s former stars and unions representing orchestra players and chorus members, whose work was cut back. More critically, the move alienated donors. To save money, the company drastically cut the number of performances it gave each year — to 16 in its 2011-12 season, down from 118 five years earlier — and saw its audience plummet to 22,500 from 225,570, according to tax filings. Raising money became an even greater challenge.

The troupe nearly went bust just before last Christmas, but was kept afloat by an emergency $1.5 million infusion from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Then, in August, several gifts failed to materialize, sparking another hectic round of fund-raising to mount “Anna Nicole” in September. Charles R. Wall, the opera company’s chairman, said that City Opera did not want to leave the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was co-producing “Anna Nicole,” in the lurch.

But nothing was left for the rest of the season. Foundations that bailed the opera out last winter declined to give more large gifts to a company that seemed to be foundering. (Bloomberg Philanthropies agreed to pay for City Opera to hire a fund-raising consultant last month.)

In the end, it was an odd twist of fate that the company founded by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia to make opera affordable and accessible to New Yorkers should close its doors when the current occupant of City Hall, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is both a billionaire and a major patron of the arts. But as the troupe headed toward bankruptcy, Mr. Bloomberg made it clear that neither his foundation nor the city would step in to save it, telling reporters that its “business model doesn’t seem to be working.”

Asked about Mr. Bloomberg’s role, Mr. Steel said only that “there’s no question but that saving New York City Opera would have been a centerpiece of the current mayor’s legacy, as it was of our founding mayor’s legacy.”

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Kate D. Levin, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, said that the city had been engaged with City Opera, but that the company had not been “very realistic about their financial position for a very long period of time.”

It was already clear that City Opera might have to close when it went public last month with its emergency appeal for $7 million to survive, Mr. Steel said. “The moment that you announce that that’s the case, the odds are that you won’t succeed,” he noted. “It’s only in true extremis that that is the correct path. The very best path is to do things quietly. But at some point I can’t employ people if I can’t pay them.”

They decided to try to raise $1 million of the money through a Kickstarter campaign. The move had been suggested by a member of the development department, who convinced board members — some of whom had never heard of Kickstarter, the online fund-raising platform — that it would highlight the company’s grass-roots support. It backfired, showing how far the company was from reaching even a small part of its fund-raising goal.

At its final performance last month, at the last of the countless operatic death scenes that the troupe has enacted over the years, the soprano Sarah Joy Miller sang, as a dying Anna Nicole Smith: “Made some bad choices, then made some worse choices, then ran out of choices.”

The same could be said of City Opera.

The company has faced money woes of varying degrees of severity for decades. But over the last decade it has lurched from crisis to crisis. Efforts to build a new performance space accomplished little, other than reminding operagoers that the acoustics at the New York State Theater were generally considered poor. In 2003 the company began running dangerously high deficits. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera next door moved into City Opera’s territory, offering cheaper tickets, new works and broadcasts of live performances in movie theaters.

Things went downhill swiftly after a series of fateful choices: the 2007 decision, led by the chairwoman, Susan Baker, to hire Gerard Mortier, the European opera impresario, who left before he even really started as general manager and artistic director when it became clear that the $60 million budget he had been promised was a fantasy; the agreement to halt productions in 2009 while the Koch Theater was renovated, which ticket sales never recovered from; and the move to use its endowment to make ends meet, which drove its annual investment income down to about $160,000 from more than $2 million.

After the Mortier debacle, the company turned to Mr. Steel, who had made his name as the executive director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University but had little experience running a major opera company. As he took the reins of the scaled-back City Opera, he found it challenging to raise money from some of the same donors who had just made contributions to support Mr. Mortier’s grand visions.

Mr. Steel acknowledged that putting on so little opera in recent years may have been a problem. “The size of the season was the most difficult thing for us to get around, and it was a catch-22,” he said. “Doing four operas was just not quite big enough. We didn’t maintain the interest and we didn’t send the message that we were growing.”

In the end, the bankruptcy vote was unanimous, board members said. Mr. Steel, who stood to lose his job, abstained.

Some board members — including Martin Oppenheimer, a longtime trustee — suggested that bankruptcy might let City Opera merge with another organization or find some other way to survive. “I’m still hopeful that something will happen,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Frenzied Last-Act Effort to Save City Opera. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe